Toshie Takahashi is Professor in the School of Culture, Media and Society, as well as the Institute for AI and Robotics, Waseda University, Tokyo. She has been appointed as an Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, the University of Cambridge. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Columbia University.
She conducts cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary research on the social impact of robots as well as the potential of AI for Good. She is currently leading two projects on youth and AI. The Goal of both projects is to contribute towards a vision of a future where human happiness takes centre stage.
The first one is “a future with AI” project in collaboration with the United Nation. The aim of this project is to deliver global voices of children and young people to the UN and other stakeholders as a response of the new UN strategy, #11 “listening to and work with” youth.
She is also involved in “Moonshot R&D projects” by leading the Gen ZAI project, engaging youths now for a global AI future. In this project, she will conduct cross-cultural research with 10000 young people in terms of AI in collaboration with CFI (Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence) at the University of Cambridge, the Stanford Social Media Lab, and others.
Her book, entitled “Towards the age of Digital Wisdom” (2016, Shinnyosha, in Japanese), which is based on the collaborative project on “Young People and Digital Media” with the University of Oxford and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, won the first prize for the Telecommunication social science award.
A media ethnographer, her writings have been included in both Japanese and International Media Studies anthologies, for example, “Artificial Intelligence/Robots and Social Impacts: Is Human First Innovation Wishful Thinking?” (2019, Journal of Information Systems Society of Japan, Vol.14, No.2., in Japaanese), “Towards the age of Digital Wisdom” (2016, Shiyosha, in Japanese), Audience Studies: A Japanese Perspective (2009, Routledge), “The Language of Social Media: Community and Identity on the Internet”. (P. Seargeant, and C. Tagg eds, 2014, Palgrave), Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies (M. Thomas ed., 2011, Routledge), International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture (K. Drotner and S.Livingstone eds., 2008, Sage), the journal New Media and Society (2010, Sage), the journal Global Media and Communication (2007, Sage).
Professor Takahashi graduated with a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MA in Sociology from the University of Tokyo and a BSc in Mathematics from Ochanomizu University.
Finally, Takahashi sits on the advisory committee of the Information and Communication Council, Ministry of the Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
